Riding-level results are nice to have so far as they go, but serious strategists want to know how the parties did in various parts of a riding: where they grew, where they fell back, who they switched to and whose switchers they picked up, how well they pulled their supporters out to the Advanced Polls, and so forth.

Ideally we'd like to see that mapped, but there are some key interim steps, some of which are very time-consuming. Obviously an essential one is assembling a complete set of the poll-by-poll results, which is what I'm reporting on tonight.

I now have a complete set of poll-by-poll result tables in the Pundits' Guide relational database from 1997 forward (including the 2000 Transposition), which are fully cross-referenced against all the other riding result tables, parties, elections, and candidates already in it. There are 395,371 polls and 2,174,723 individual candidate poll results, and between the size of the tables themselves and their associated database indexes (what makes the pages run reasonably quickly), this new dataset is taking up just over 700 Megabytes of space in the database.

It was assembled from the raw data provided by Elections Canada for each general election plus the transposition, and hand-typed in many cases from the PDFs they supplied for by-elections. Thanks to the Chief Electoral Officer for responding favourably to my plea for raw by-election data on their website as well, which certainly made the job easier towards the end. Thanks also to my long-suffering housemate, who read those printed by-election results out loud to me while I typed them. The whole thing was a herculean task, not least because the raw data was supplied in at least 3 different formats over that period of time, and candidates were sorted alpha by family name, rather than consistently by party. The latest Elections Canada format for poll-by-poll results, however, represents a marked improvement, and I could certainly live with it going forward. I also had to cross-check and double-check my data entry to make sure everything added up properly in every direction, in the process of which I discovered a few errors with the 1997 raw data in 4 Quebec ridings, which Elections Canada is now fixing up.

A "poll" here means a "polling station". Polls in the mapping context are "polling divisions". You'd think there would be a one-to-one relationship between them, but in fact sometimes polling divisions get too large population-wise and have to be split. If they're split geographically before an election is called, you get poll numbers like "195", "195-1", "195-2", which represent different polling divisions. On the other hand, if they're not split until after the campaign has started, it's done alphabetically by family name, and the polls are called "195A" and "195B" for example. In such a case they are considered to be 2 polling stations for the same polling division (195). You can even see examples of poll numbers such as "195", "195-1A", "195-1B", "195-2". Here the original polling division was geographically split into 3 polling divisions before the election, but the second part was still found to have too many electors and thus was split alphabetically into 2 polling stations after the writ was issued.

Polling divisions can also get too small. s.538(1) of the Elections Act says that they should have a minimum of 250 electors, and so sometimes a polling division can get merged into another one, or combined with another one (a new development it appears since 2004, and I'm not sure I understand the difference between the two at the moment), or be declared "void" or "no poll held".

There are several different kinds of polling stations:

• Regular polls, pretty much what you'd expect, they are numbered sequentially starting from the number 1, and they represent the votes of people who voted on Election Day.
  
• Apartment polls, which are a subset of the regular polls, but are numbered in the 400s; also for Election Day voters.
  
• Mobile polls, which are designed for residents of long-term care facilities and the disabled, further to various provisions of the Elections Act. They are numbered in the 500s. The polling station is brought to their room, and/or remains in a central lobby area for a defined period of time on Election Day.
  
• Advance polls, which are numbered in the 600s. They include votes cast on the defined Advance voting days, but not special ballots nor people who voted in the returning office as I understand it.
  
• Special Voting Rules Group I (SVR1), which is not really either a polling division or a polling station, but is reported in a separate line. The official definition is "Includes Canadian citizens temporarily residing outside Canada, members of the Canadian Forces (except members of the Canadian Forces who voted at the polling station established for the polling division of their place of ordinary residence) and incarcerated electors", so not exactly a strategically homogenous group!
• Special Voting Rules Group II (SVR1), again neither a polling division nor station, but reported on its own line in the official voting results. The official definition is "Includes Canadian citizens residing in Canada who voted by special ballot in or outside their electoral districts"; in other words here are the special ballot voters and folks who voted in the Returning Office.
  

Neither Advance polls nor the SVR2 group has a defined count of electors, obviously. So we can calculated a candidate's share of the vote in those polls, but not their share of the electorate in that poll-type (I suppose you could express the result as a percent of the whole electorate for the riding, but I haven't done that here). Merged polls have a defined number of electors, but no results, so I had to precalculate the "merged electors" of the polls they got merged into, for database performance reasons.

You've probably also noticed the "Number of Polls" measure for each election on the riding profile page here, which is also found at the bottom of any poll-by-poll report from Elections Canada. Here's how they come up with that number:

• Take the highest regular poll number from the bottom of the printed poll-by-polls results report
• Add the number of geographically split polling divisions, eg 190-1
• Add the number of non-geographically split polling stations, eg 70A, 70B
• Add the number of 400-series apartment polls
• Add the number of 500-series Mobile polls
• Add the number of 600-series Advance polls
• Subtract the number of polls merged or combined into others
• Subtract the number of void or "no poll held" polls
• This gives you the stated # of polling stations by Elections Canada
• It doesn't include the Special Voting Rules Groups I and II for each riding

The next step of course is to assemble, model and import all the polling division boundary geospatial data, so the polling station results can be linked to their polling divisions, and the whole kit and caboodle can be mapped. Not an overnight project.

However, so that we can make use of the poll-by-poll data that's available now, I've provided a 5th tab on each riding profile page called "Poll-by-Poll". It shows the number of polls won + tied by each candidate, broken down by each type of poll (Regular, Mobile, Advance, SVR1 and SVR2), along with their share of the vote, and their percent of the electorate in the cases where that's measurable (i.e., not for Advance or SVR2, as explained above).

This allows us to see whether a certain party was more effective in pulling its support to the Advance Polls, is overrepresented in the Mobile Polls, or whether the vote shifted in a certain riding between the Advance Polls and Election Day itself.

For example, let's look at the riding of Brampton – Springdale, ON: the Conservatives won the Advance Polls by 50.3% to 37.2% over the Liberals, but by Election Day the Liberals won the Regular Polls 41.6% to 36.5%. The Conservatives won 17 Advance Polls outright (there were no ties) to the Liberals' 5, but on Election Day they won 77 of the Regular Polls outright to the Liberals' 145, plus they were tied in a further 6.

Finally, I've supplied handy links to the original poll-by-poll result reports for each electoral event at Elections Canada from 2004 forward (the earlier data is not linkable). Just click on the little Elections Canada icon next to the election of interest on any riding profile page's "Poll-by-Poll" tab to go directly to the Official Voting Results (OVR) Poll-by-Poll Results report.

OK, with that job out of the way, I'd say it's high time we got caught up on the nomination news around here, don't you.

Labels: Poll-by-Poll Results

A fifth Member of Parliament has announced he won't be running in the next election. Jim Abbott from Kootenay – Columbia, BC was one of 10 remaining MPs first elected from the then-new Reform Party in 1993, when he defeated NDP M.P. Sid Parker.

The B.C. Member of Parliament is the fourth Conservative incumbent to announce his retirement. Bloc Québécois M.P. Jean-Yves Roy is the fifth retiring incumbent. A complete list can be found on the "Search the Database" page under "Nominations Progress in Ridings with Retiring Incumbents". I don't know what we should read into the fact that Abbott and New Brunswick Southwest M.P. Greg Thompson have both decided to announce their retirements just before the Commons returns from this break.

Abbott is the second-oldest of the 10 remaining Class of 1993 Reformers, but the Conservative caucus includes a further three MPs their senior. [UPDATE: He is the 10th remaining member *of the Conservative caucus* first elected as a Reformer in 1993. Of course Keith Martin was also elected then, but crossed the floor to the Liberal Party in 2004. Sorry for the confusion.] You can find a full list of MPs by age at the Library of Parliament's ParlINFO website. I also compiled a list of MPs in the 40th Parliament by year of first election.

Looking at its Google Map*, the riding straddles the lower part of the BC-Alberta border: from Yoho National Park outside Banff, it reaches through Golden and Glacier National Park as far west as the railway town of Revelstoke and then down to Nakusp in the north; and also south along skiing country through Invermere to the sister cities of Kimberley and Cranbrook (the focal point of some of the province's worst forest fires earlier this decade; coincidentally the very week my partner and I had scheduled a two-week driving trip through the area). To their east are the mining communities of Fernie and Sparwood; while the farming community of Creston, the Mormon community of Bountiful, and most of Kootenay Lake lies to the west. It includes territory claimed by the Ktunaxa-Kinbasket Tribal Council in their treaty negotiations, and the former residential school outside the St. Mary's Indian Reserve near Cranbrook has been converted into a conference centre and resort hotel with golf course and casino.

Before Abbott's six-term tenure began, the seat swang back and forth between Parker for the NDP and Stan Graham for the Progressive Conservatives. A former well-known local broadcaster, Abbott took the seat in 1993 with 48% of the vote, and in subsequent years collected as much as 68% before tapering back to a vote share in the mid-50s in the last 3 elections. The NDP has fallen from its earlier mid-40s vote shares of 20 years ago but is still the strongest contender in this seat, the Liberals having fallen to fourth behind the Green Party there in 2008.

I've suspected for some time that Abbott might be ready to retire soon, given that the Prime Minister has made some high-profile trips to the riding, and it ranked very high in several recent compilations of stimulus funding by riding. It was also targetted with a lot of federal and provincial radio advertising about the introduction of the provincial carbon tax and the proposal for a federal carbon tax in the summer before the last election, which I noticed on another driving trip through the area with my partner's daughter.

In any event a similar suspicion may also have led the NDP to delay nominating here until it was clear whether they would be recruiting for an open seat or one occupied by a strong incumbent. The party holds 3 of the 4 provincial seats in the Kootenays (which federally comprise this seat and neighbouring BC Southern Interior). But it doesn't currently hold Kootenay East which includes Cranbrook, where they ran Ktunaxa treaty negotiator Troy Sebastien. Sebastien, BC Treaty Commissioner Sophie Pierre, and retired former MLA Corky Evans from Nelson-Creston would probably appear on their ideal candidate search list, were 2008 candidate Leon Pendleton not to run again. I'll have to catch up on my reading to see who the likely Conservative candidates would be, although BC Conservative Party leader Wilf Hanni also ran provincially in the Cranbrook seat as well. The Green Party has already nominated new candidate Bryan Hunt, and I haven't seen any Liberal names surface as yet.

I've deleted Abbott's entry from the list of nominated candidates, and added his seat to the list of retiring incumbents. One thing's for sure: he'll be retiring to one of the most beautiful parts of the country, lucky guy! Thanks to commenter "Shadow" for drawing the clipping to our attention.

-----------------------

* To the commenter who wrote the other week to say not enough detail appears in the rural maps, please note that these maps are fully interactive, which means that you can click on the + sign to zoom in, or else just double-click on the spot you want to zoom in to. You can also click and hold down your mouse to pan map right or left, up or down.

Labels: 41st General Election Nominations, Conservatives, Retiring Incumbents

So long as I've been involved in politics, we've always measured performance by "percent of the vote", aka "vote share", which is the candidate's or party's number of votes expressed as a percentage of the valid ballots cast.

We say that a party's vote share went up or down, or that party X lost a certain percent of the vote to party Y; and define the gap between first and second place (the "percent margin") as a percentage of the valid ballots cast as well.

The unspoken assumptions behind this analytic shorthand were two-fold: that turnout was reasonably constant, and that in any event the party leanings of those who didn't vote for whatever reason in a certain election were insignificantly different from those who did.

I'm no expert in turnout, although André Blais and Peter Loewen who are have just published a working paper estimating it, available through the Elections Canada website if you missed the citation at Aaron Wherry's blog the other day; they are also the same two who've written about youth engagement for Elections Canada here.

But I think anyone who's active in politics these days can agree that turnout levels are dropping, and there's good reason to suspect that voters and non-voters are now diverging in a number of ways. We would probably also draw a distinction between long-term non-voters and temporarily discouraged voters, in order to round out the picture.

Karl Rove originated the strategy in the United States of finding wedge issues to motivate targeted groups of hitherto unlikely voters to support his candidate, while employing other (primarily "air-war") tactics to discourage the supporters of his candidate's opponents in the hopes that they'd "stay home" (i.e., not go out to vote). As I've written before, there are two paths to winning: one by increasing your own share of the vote, whether from non-voters or former supporters of your opponent; and one by causing your opponents to stay home. In response to the Rove-ian approach, David Plouffe and David Axelrod advocated a different strategy for their candidate's campaign, where they sought to increase vote-share from long-term non-voters by promoting voter registration and running fully-funded ground campaigns in all 50 states, rather than just targetted efforts in swing states as had been the usual practice in the past.

As you've no doubt figured out by now, the usual metric of "vote share" is just not up to the task of measuring or properly describing these movements. In a situation where no other votes change, but party A's votes stay home, using percentage of the vote as the indicator can make it look as though party A's supporters switched to party B and C, when they did no such thing.

This is why I've added "percent of the electorate" (aka "% Elec") to the riding profile pages here, and will be slowly adding it elsewhere in the database as well. For greater clarity: a candidate's or party's "percent of the electorate" is their number of votes expressed as a percentage of the eligible voters, rather than the valid ballots cast. Then the number of non-voters (NV) can also expressed as a percentage (plus it also works out to 100% - the turnout rate), and added to the bottom of the list. In a typical riding profile these days, the NVs are winning, but their numbers do vary from election to election. I show all the % Elec calculations in an italic font, so it's easier on the eyes to distinguish them from the "percent of the vote" column.

So, with this new metric available, what new insights can we get into some of the pivotal strategic questions of the next campaign? Let's take a second look at some of the seats that changed hands in earlier campaigns, and see if we can find out why:

• Welland, ON and Sudbury, ON - These two seats switched from the Liberals to the NDP last time. If you take a look at the results expressed as a percent of the electorate: the Conservative vote stayed constant, the NDP vote (surprisingly) declined very slightly by a single point in both case, but the Liberal vote dropped substantially (by 7 and 10 points respectively), ALL of it switching to the non-voting (NV) camp. Suddenly it becomes very clear that the NDP strategy to keep the seats must involve increasing their vote from longer-term non-voters, while the Liberal strategy will be focused on re-motivating their earlier supporters to return to the polls in the hopes of regaining their former seats. Going back one more election in both ridings, the NDP vote did increase in 2006 from the ranks of previous non-voters, but it did not increase further between 2006 and 2008.
• Kitchener Centre, ON - In this case, the NDP and Green vote stayed constant from 2004 to 2008, while the Conservative vote increased between 2004 and 2006, but stayed put in 2008. The difference in 2008 is that the Liberal vote dropped by 7.5 points, all of it switching to the non-voting camp. This was enough to cause the seat to change hands by 339 votes, just 1.6 per poll. That's 0.8 percent of the vote, and 0.4% of the electorate. So, turnout dropped from 64.7% to 57.0%, all at the expense of the Liberal incumbent.
• Toronto – Danforth, ON in 2004, and Trinity – Spadina, ON in 2006 - In both these races, the NDP won the seats away from the Liberals in a different way than the first case: Jack Layton won in 2004 by picking up votes from previous non-voters, a feat not achieved by his wife Olivia Chow until 2006 in her riding. A similar pattern can be seen in Timmins – James Bay, ON in 2004. Here the other parties' votes held constant, or else the Liberals declined slightly, while the NDP posted big gains as turnout fell. In subsequent elections, with the incumbency tables turned, the Liberal vote continued to fall, with some of it switching to the Conservatives and Greens as well as staying home, leaving Layton and Chow with increased margins, and a more divided opposition, even as their own vote abated somewhat.
• Saint Boniface, MB - Of course, not every riding that changed hands fit one of the above patterns, as in this case where turnout did not change too much and it appears that votes actually moved from the Liberals to the Conservatives.

I think it's important to examine turnout and the parties' shares of the electorate much more so than vote-share when trying to explain how votes shift between elections.

It's *particularly* important when various schemes are multiplying in the commentariat and blogosphere about how parties could or should combine their efforts or step aside in favour of others, whether from my old Carleton poli sci prof Reg Whitaker and his colleague Philip Resnick, writing in TheTyee.ca about how to defeat the government, or L. Ian MacDonald writing in the weekend's Montreal Gazette about how to block the Bloc in Quebec.

What I hope I've demonstrated is that just looking at changes in a party's vote-share from one election to the next, and comparing it to changes in another party's share, can lead to some erroneous conclusions, and cause you to miss other movements which actually occurred ... with potentially serious strategic consequences.

Most of the examples above come from Ontario, because I've been working on Ontario ridings for another reason the past few days, but the same reasoning when applied to seats in British Columbia will allow you to see more clearly how votes shifted over the past few elections.

Next time: a new tool to examine regional party vote swings in comparison with one another.

Labels: Percent of the Electorate, Turnout

Time to pass along a few accumulated developments in party apparatus news from here and there:

• Liberal Party - As a result of their posting which ended on January 6, the Liberal Party has hired a new National Director, Ian McKay from B.C., who will be starting in early March, when he's to "continue the modernization of our Party's communication and technological infrastructure and give him the tools to drive our membership engagement process," according to party president Alf Apps' letter to the membership. A financial services consultant, McKay ran in the 2000 general election in West Vancouver – Sunshine Coast, BC. Next on their agenda is the hiring of a new President for the National Liberal Fund: in effect the party's new chief fundraiser.
  
• Conservative Party - A re-organization of the party's Quebec office was first reported by Le Devoir at the end of January, and followed up on by L. Ian MacDonald's weekend column for the Montreal Gazette. The changes appear to have been set in motion when director-general Claude Durand decided late in the year to step down and take care of her son's health concerns. Her resignation took effect at the end of January, by which point she had reportedly identified some 60 candidates in the 75 Quebec ridings (not all of whom have been nominated or announced, apparently). It was revealed this past weekend that in fact the party is now closing its Montreal office, and opening one in Québec City instead, to be run by one of the successful organizers in the recent by-election in Montmagny – L'Islet – Kamouraska – Rivière-du-Loup, Ghislain Maltais, who is also a former provincial Liberal MNA. Maltais will be backed up by Joseph Soares, based out of party headquarters in Ottawa, who was also a part of the by-election campaign team, MacDonald reports.
  
  Meanwhile, new party president John Walsh had the recent task of taking control of the Calgary West, AB Conservative riding association (aka EDA or electoral district association), which had been planning to conduct a referendum requesting an open nomination meeting at its upcoming annual general meeting, even though incumbent M.P. Rob Anders was already renominated last May along with the rest of his caucus. Kevin Libin ran down the inside story in a blogpost for the National Post's online "Full Comment" website, which reports a lot of perspective I had not read before.
  
• Green Party - There have simply not been enough hours in the day to keep on top of every twist and turn in the on-going debate about when and how to elect, re-elect, review or reconstitute the leadership of the Green Party and repair its finances, although party activists have been pouring themselves into debating the issues at great length in the comment sections of a number of different Green blogs, including DaveBagler.ca, Not an Official Green Party Canada Site (NAOGPCS), the democraticSpace.com blog, and of course Report on Greens. I'm unaware whether there has been any final resolution on the leadership convention question. In addition, the party's Revenue Sharing Agreement, whereby the national party distributes a third of its quarterly public subsidy to the EDAs, is also being questioned in light of its current debt situation.
  
  The big news, at least to me, is that there is a third potential leadership candidate on the horizon -- a woman -- who has been meeting people at private dinners, but has not yet announced her campaign. I've made several attempts to find out who it is, but no luck as yet. Apparently a communications plan is in place regarding the timing of the announcement, and the trigger may yet not be pulled. However, she appears to be supported by the BlueGreenBlogger at NAOGPCS, who teased her candidacy at the end of a recent blogpost. The woman, whoever she is, would be joining former federal and Ontario party leader Frank de Jong, and presumably Elizabeth May herself. As the party's constitution is currently written, May's fixed four-year term ends at some point in 2010.
  
• Bloc Québécois - In a reply to a recent blogpost on the partes' quarterly contributions by Chantal Hébert at l'Actualité, the directeur-general of the Bloc Québécois confirmed that their party's approach to fundraising is to favour the constituency associations as well. Gilbert Gardner pointed to 2008 numbers showing that the Bloc raised over $800K through its constituency associations, as compared with some $700K by the party headquarters, and suggested that the 2009 reports from their EDAs which are due this May would show a similar pattern.
  
• New Democrats - The first initiative springing from the NDP's recent Federal Council meeting to plan its strategy leading up to the next election has emerged, and it's focussed on riding fundraising as well. A Facebook group has just popped up for the "Local Victories Challenge", which according to NDP blogger The Jurist at Accidental Deliberations, is designed to make a central investment into riding associations, to help them build their local fundraising infrastructure. We've reported before that party national director Brad Lavigne and leader Jack Layton have been citing statistics about the performance of their candidates who are able to spend close to the spending limit, so it appears this initiative stems from that analysis. After the party's decision in the last election to put in place the financing necessary to spend the national limit (they wound up spending around 84% of the limit in the end), this time according to the promotional material for the Local Victories Challenge they're hoping to finally raise candidate spending up from the 20-25% or so of the limit across the board where it's stayed for the past 5 elections. You'll recall that Professor Bill Stanbury and I studied candidate spending in a two-part series last spring, in which we found that this 20-25% was in fact concentrated into a number of ridings that the party had targetted, and was highly correlated with the percent of the vote NDP candidates obtained.

Tomorrow: some new functionality for the Pundits' Guide database, and the importance of examining candidates' share of the electorate in order to understand vote switching.

Labels: Bloc Québécois, Conservatives, Greens, Liberals, NDP, Party Finance

OK, who's up for a bit of nomination news? There are a few items that have piled up, and some of them are quite interesting; starting with:

• St. John's South – Mount Pearl, NL - A Memorial University prof reports in his blog, Tickling Bight, this week that well-known Conservative television pundit Tim Powers is "rumoured to be sizing up a run" in this riding, currently held by first-term Liberal M.P. Siobhan Coady. Although based in Ottawa, Powers has also maintained good relations with the Newfoundland & Labrador government, even serving as an unofficial spokesperson for Premier Danny Williams when questions were first raised about his seeking medical treatment outside the country. In the wake of the "ABC (Anyone but Conservative) Campaign" run by the Premier during the last federal election campaign, a thawing of relations between the two conservative parties would be a precondition for federal Conservatives to become electorally competitive in the province again, and Powers undoubtedly played a backroom role recently in smoothing the way for the Prime Minister to visit the Premier in St. John's just days before Williams left for his surgery. As the blogger also notes, his entry could also open up the very close two-way race (2.8% of the vote, or 5.1 votes per poll) this riding saw in 2008 between Liberal victor Coady, and the NDP's Ryan Cleary, who has already been renominated for a second run at the seat. Taking a closer look at the riding map, I see that the boundaries have changed from the way I remember the St. John's West of old: it now takes in the part of downtown around the harbour (including Water and Duckworth streets) up to and including Quidi Vidi village, and has lost much of the southern part of the Avalon peninsula (basically everything south of Petty Harbour) to neighbouring Avalon riding. So, will he run? @powerstim himself is telling his tweeps entertainingly that "no moving boxes will be required", but of course that could still mean pretty much anything.
• St. John's East, NL - Staying in St. John's, the same blogger passes along news apparently originating with the CBC's Dave Cochrane (no link available) that former provincial Cancer Society director Peter Dawe "is considering" a run for the Liberals against the NDP's Jack Harris in this riding. Dawe headed the Cancer Society as the case of the inaccurate breast cancer tests became known and was being investigated, but he stepped down in the middle of last September to "seek other work". The timing of Mr. Dawe's resignation, not long after Liberal Leader Michael Ignatieff's announcement in Sudbury last September that he would try to bring the government down, leads the blogger to believe that Dawe has been considering the run for some time. Harris commanded a 74.6% share of the vote last time, with Liberal candidate Walter Noel placing a distant second at 12.6%.
• Saskatoon – Humboldt, SK - Further west, a former M.P. today announced another run as an Independent candidate to try and regain his old riding. Jim Pankiw was elected as a Reform M.P. in 1997, serving two terms, and finally losing his seat while running as an independent in 2004. Three-term Conservative M.P. Brad Trost won the resulting four-way race in 2004 with just 26.7% of the vote, but has since increased his vote share to 49.1% in 2006 and 53.8% in 2008, with the Liberal vote declining, and the NDP moving firmly into second place. New Democrats are already revising the riding's priority upwards in light of Pankiw's return, a reader writes to confirm, and have had their candidate, health policy consultant Denise Kouri, in place since early last fall. The riding is home to the University of Saskatchewan, and encompasses the northeast part of Saskatoon and the rural areas further northeast, including Humboldt, Domremy, some farmland and a number of first nations' reserve communities.

Next time, some updates from B.C., and a round-up of a few more candidates who have stepped down.

Labels: 41st General Election Nominations, Conservatives, Independent Candidates, Liberals

In my likely nomination for best blogpost of the year in 2010, Daveberta tries to help those eastern pundits *not* to spin in the dark.

Labels: Alberta Politics

Thanks to Glen McGregor from this morning's Ottawa Citizen, we learn that a judge in the Ontario Superior Court has, as expected, granted an extension in fundraising time to the remaining 2006 Liberal leadership candidates having outstanding loans on the books.

The candidates will have a further two years to raise the funds necessary to pay off their debts, and must file reports with Elections Canada every six months, as of March. This puts the new deadline at the end of 2011, presumably December 31.

The latest figures for their outstanding loan amounts were reported in the story as follows:

• $395,890 [amount from June 3, 2008; his latest amount outstanding is not listed, as the story says he has been given until next year to pay it off] - Ken DRYDEN - June 30, 2010 deadline, but apparently already deferred to next year by the Chief Electoral Officer
  
• $193,133 - Maurizio BEVILACQUA
• $152,800 - Joe VOLPE
• $131,361 - Gerard KENNEDY
• $130,260 - Martha HALL FINDLEY
• $78,500 - Hedy FRY
• $40,000 - Stéphane DION
• $0 - Carolyn BENNETT
• $0 - Scott BRISON
• $0 - Michael IGNATIEFF
• $0 - Bob RAE

To put this in perspective, Mr. Bevilacqua will have to raise an average of just over $8,000 per month between now and the end of 2011 in order to meet that requirement, while Mr. Dion will have to raise just under $1,700 monthly to do the same.

Put another way, the campaign spending limit in Mr. Bevilacqua's Ontario riding of Vaughan was $103,581 in the last election. His outstanding debt is 1.86 times that amount.

Further to the rules, which were amended for retroactive application to the 2006 Liberal leadership race, these funds must be raised from individuals who have not already donated their one-time maximum contribution of $1,100 to that particular leadership race.

To those unfamiliar with the background of this issue, the reason leadership candidates are given a deadline to repay loans they take out to run their campaigns, is that an unrepaid loan would otherwise constitute a campaign contribution, and there are limits on the size of campaign contributions to leadership campaigns under the Elections Act. Indeed this issue was flagged during the introduction of those Elections Act changes, but never resolved legislatively. Subsequent legislation intended to address the issue of loans, their size, and who they could be taken from, has died on the order paper.

Labels: Party Finance

It's time to update two more analyses of the four quarters' worth of party fundraising. First, the contributions over $200 by week.

We read in Jane Taber's blogpost at the beginning of January about Liberal Party president Alf Apps' fundraising letter in which he claimed the Liberals had raised $100K in the last three days of 2009 alone. Indeed, they appear to have raised $319,696 in the last week from large contributors. The NDP raised $218,699 the same week from their large donors, while the Conservatives raised $355,828 from the same group. (We can't tell how much was raised from small donors by week, since those contributions are aggregated by the quarter and not dated.)

[Click on the chart to open an enlarged version.]



The one other week that was notable in the third quarter was the week starting September 27. The Liberal raised $289,387 that week, the NDP's weekly fundraising also spiked somewhat to $87,472, while the Conservatives' dropped to $85,334. You'll recall that this was the week the issue of the opposition's confidence in the government came to a head. The following week the two opposition parties' fundraising dropped off to almost nothing, while the Conservatives' rose slightly.

Next, let's take a look at the distribution of donations by total contribution size over the year. This analysis is an estimate, conducted across the four quarterly reports. It may miss some contributors whose donations did not meet the reporting threshold in any of the quarters, but the sum of whose donations would meet the end-of-year reporting threshold. The value of their donations would still be counted here in the <= $200 category, but would not be properly categorized by total contribution size.

The Liberals continue to rely most heavily on their largest donors of any of the three main parties, obtaining 36.1% of their fundraising from donors at the limit, and 46.1% from donors giving $800 or more annually. This compares with 5.9% and 9.2% for the NDP, and 7.1% and 14.3% for the Conservatives.

While the parties apparently all showed increases in the number of donors over 2007 and 2008, it is not safe to compare sums of quarterly contributors to the annual reports of contributor numbers, due to the high likelihood of double-counting. It's much safer to compare annuals over annuals, which we'll be able to do when the annual reports come out at the end of June.

Safer are comparisons based on amount, so long as the correct base year is used. 2008 was an election year, and thus an unusually high benchmark to try to meet in non-election years. Nevertheless the Liberals bested their 2008 fundraising total, while the NDP and Conservatives topped their 2007 totals, but fell off as expected from their 2008 levels.

Cumulative distribution of donations and contributors by total donation, by party, First, Second, Third & Fourth Quarters 2009

$ Amt of donations # of contributors	Lib		NDP		Cons
	$ Amt	Num	$ Amt	Num	$ Amt	Num
TOTAL	$9,564,677 (100.0%)	69,840 (100.0%)	$4,036,237 (100.0%)	51,342 (100.0%)	$17,707,846 (100.0%)	152,141 (100.0%)
(% of 2008)	(164.6%)	(226.2%)	(74.6%)	(172.9%)	(83.6%)	(136.0%)
(% of 2007)	(213.9%)	(298.1%)	(101.9%)	(220.5%)	(104.3%)	(141.9%)
<=$200*	3,160,203 (33.0%)	60,877 (87.2%)	2,707,373 (67.1%)	48,492 (94.4%)	12,008,855 (67.8%)	141,620 (93.1%)
<=$400	861,744 (9.0%)	2,800 (4.0%)	595,830 (14.8%)	1,872 (3.6%)	1,838,884 (10.4%)	5,783 (3.8%)
<=$600	867,739 (9.1%)	1,695 (2.4%)	232,833 (5.8%)	453 (0.9%)	838,820 (4.7%)	1,622 (1.1%)
<=$800	263,596 (2.8%)	369 (0.5%)	127,770 (3.2%)	176 (0.3%)	488,534 (2.8%)	666 (0.4%)
<=$1000	961,512 (10.1%)	1018 (1.5%)	136,173 (3.4%)	146 (0.3%)	1,279,157 (7.2%)	1,315 (0.9%)
<=$1100	3,050,489 (31.9%)	2,788 (4.0%)	202,907 (5.0%)	186 (0.4%)	1,227,751 (6.9%)	1,120 (0.7%)
>$1100	399,394 (4.2%)	293 (0.4%)	33,352 (0.8%)	17 (0.0%)	25,845 (0.1%)	15 (0.0%)

* <=$200 count includes counts reported to Elections Canada for both the categories "<=$200" and "<=$20" in each of the first three quarters; other counts calculated by totalling contributions for each donor (i.e., for each unique combination of firstname + middlename + lastname), and then counting by total contribution size for each donor.

Labels: Party Finance

[Welcome National Newswatch readers!]

Both the Conservative and Liberal parties experienced a pullback in fundraising in the fourth quarter of 2009, with each party showing a decline from 2007 levels. Meanwhile the smaller parties had mixed results, with the Bloc Québécois posting a decline from 2007 levels, but the NDP and Greens posting their best ever non-election year Q4 results.

2008 was an election year, which historically shows higher fundraising results for every party. Thus while year over year comparisons are interesting, they are less valid for assessing the strength of a party's fundraising apparatus.

[You can examine all the results in detail, and do your own analyses, by using the Browse Finance$ module here at the Pundits' Guide, and selecting "Quarterly Data".]



Now, to put things in perspective, the Conservatives did raise $4.87M from just over 40,000 donors. It might be their worst fourth quarter since 2004, but it's nothing to sneeze at in a recession, and nearly meets the amount raised in 2007. The party's overall take for the year rings in at $17.7M, down from a record $21.2M in 2008, but it still represents a small increase over 2007 as well.




Similarly, for the Liberals, they posted below average fourth quarter numbers (at $1.91M, they were lower than in 2007 when they raised $1.94M under former leader Mr. Dion), but those results nevertheless sit on top of record second and third quarters earlier this year for an annual take that exceeded even the election year of 2008, and nearly beat the last election year of the new financial regime, 2006. Remember, however, that an overwhelming number of the second quarter contributions were in fact delegate fees to the party's Vancouver convention in May.


The party has also slightly improved its take from the small donor category over the course of 2009 (donations <= $200), and significantly increased their numbers, a positive development given its previous dependence on large donors. This was compensation for the slight reduction in contributions they experienced in the large donor category this quarter, although that was perhaps to be expected, given the number of large donors who were already tapped out from earlier in the year.



We've already reported on the Bloc Québécois' fourth quarter report when it was released 10 days ago, but by way of recap, they appear to have replaced their former pattern of raising most of their money in the fourth quarter from small contributors, with a program to raise money from sustaining contributions spread out over the year. The change appeared to occur in Q4 of 2008.



The NDP would have to be classified as the "comeback kid" of fundraising in 2009. From a brutal, but apparently planned, first half of the year, the party made up the difference in spades over the third and fourth quarters, posting their best ever non-election year Q4 in 2009, and in fact their best ever non-election year, period, with a quarterly take of $1.65M in Q4 for an annual total that broke $4M for the first time ever outside of an election year.




And, in spite of recent stories about the financial situation of the Green Party, it's worth pointing out that they also managed to post a slight increase over 2007, based notably on a large increase in the number of small donors (from 2,893 in 2007 to 4,239 in 2009). The difficulty for that party is that it's still carrying an estimated debt of between $1M and $1.3M from the last election, and is raising just $1.12M annually on top of the $1.86M it receives in party public subsidies each year.



Next, I'll take a closer look at the parties' annual takes by total contribution size, and also by date. This will of course be an estimate until the complete annual reports are available at the end of June.

Labels: Party Finance

The following article from this morning's edition is reprinted with the kind permission of the Hill Times.

Online voting won’t hike youth turnout, but "it grows on you," forum told

Electronic voter registration will be the first step in Canada, although Chief Electoral Officer Marc Mayrand is authorized to explore "alternative voting methods".

By ALICE FUNKE

MPs and party officials joined a group of academics and election administrators at Carleton University last Tuesday, to learn from Canadian municipalities and other countries who have already implemented internet voting (i-voting).

The symposium brought together experts from Estonia, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, California, and officials from three Canadian municipalities, all of whom have included some form of online voting in their recent elections.

Elections Canada participated in the event as part of its mandate to study voting technologies and encourage youth voter participation. Ironically, researchers addressing the forum all reported that i-voting did not on balance increase turnout among younger voters, but rather was especially high in 40 to 50 year-olds.

Estonia, dubbed "E-stonia" by one presenter because internet access there is a legislated social right, is the only country where remote i-voting is in place on a national scale. It works because of the country's widespread adoption of secure digital government ID cards for every citizen. The country is also trying to make smart card readers standard equipment on all new computers. The cards enable a wide range of government services from library cards to health care, and also permit a much more secure electronic voting process.

Electronic voter registration will be the first step in Canada, said Elections Canada spokesperson John Enright, although Chief Electoral Officer Marc Mayrand is authorized by a series of amendments to the Elections Act in 2000 to explore "alternative voting methods" down the road, with the prior approval of Parliament.

Members of Parliament are readying themselves now to contribute to that study through the Procedures and House Affairs Committee, said Bloc Québécois MP Claude DeBellefeuille (Beauharnois-Salaberry, Que.). The Bloc is still researching the issue, she added, and has yet to take a position as a party.

Conservative MP Scott Reid (Lanark-Frontenac-Lennox and Addington, Ont.) was also in fact-finding mode for his caucus, as much for internal party processes as for elections, he said. Their next leadership convention must be held by postal ballot, he noted, but there might be some opportunities for test-runs of i-voting since their party constitution also provides for internal referenda to decide certain questions.

Theresa Kavanagh, who works in the NDP Whip's Office, wondered about the new role of scrutineers in an electronic voting process. All the electronic systems to date have instituted a full auditing process, but Ms. Kavanagh said she still has some questions about how it would work.

Municipal officials from Markham, Halifax, and Peterborough said they've all found very high user acceptance and satisfaction in post-election surveys, and that voter acceptance and adoption of internet voting grows over time.

“The municipalities are perhaps naive about the amount of risk they're assuming,” warned internet voting security expert Richard Akerman of the PaperVoteCanada.ca blog, though. “Very closely contested elections like Al Franken's recent race for the U.S. Senate were only settled because people could actually see the ballots,” he said. Had it been conducted over the internet, “the expense of defending the integrity of that system in the courts would have been huge,” he claimed.

More participants were comfortable with the idea of using i-voting during an advanced voting period for snowbirds, overseas voters, students and the disabled, noting that the current mail-in ballot procedures for such voters are no more secure than any internet solution. For visually impaired voters, the recent municipal i-voting pilots were the first time they had ever been able to cast a secret ballot. These four target audiences will be the focus of any trial run of electronic voting in a future byelection, Deputy Chief Electoral Officer Rennie Molnar told the conference.

Alice Funke is the publisher of the Pundits’ Guide to Canadian Federal Elections (punditsguide.ca).

Labels: Online Voting